Forget about fondue sets and improvise your own

Press, 7 January 1987, Page 20

Forget about fondue sets and improvise your own

Food & Fable by

David Burton

The reappearance of fondue sets in the shops, and advertisements for them in the paper, makes me wonder if perhaps fondues are becoming respectable again. For a long time after the great fondue craze of the late 1960 s and early ’7os, mere mention of the word was enough to raise a sardonic smile on the lips of sophisticates. Everybody had their story of huddling around a tinny made-in-Hong Kong fondue pot, which burned on the bottom before the top was even warm, engaging a dozen other guests in virtual sword fights with those dinky forks in an effort to extract a piece of cheesedunked bread, which invariably fell off and got drowned in the stringy morass.

The joke of these fondue sets is that they are some American designer’s fantasy, so far removed from what the Swiss themselves use as to be unrecognisable. When I sat down to a real fondue in a home in Switzerland for the first time, I was interested to see that the pot was not made of thin aluminium,

stainless steel, or copper, but solid, enamelled, cast iron, with a large handle. Even more traditional is a wide, flat-bottomed, earthenware pot known as a caquelon. Such implements make a lot of sense for a fondue because the heat from the spirit burner underneath is evenly conducted, thus avoiding the burned patches which occur in modern fondue pots. As for the forks, forget those elongated cocktailstyle numbers with the turned wooden handles: the Swiss use the common old garden table fork. In fact, forget fondue sets altogether, since improvising with your existing kitchen equipment (assuming, of course, that you have a cast iron or earthenware pot) gives you a fondue which is not only more efficient, but also closer to the Swiss original. A spirit burner can pose a stumbling block, but here too, you can improvise. I use the burner and stand from my Victorian samovar; others may have a chafing dish stand.

A friend of mine simply uses his camper’s gas cooker, turned down to its lowest flame, which may not be the most elegant apparatus in the world but is certainly effective. Like any fad, fondues died mostly through overexposure, though their demise was undoubtedly hastened by some of the more revolting bastardisations that were spawned back then.

A glance through fondue coockbooks from that era reveals recipes for

anything blit the original ingredient (cheese) and a truly barfy selection of ideas at that. Liverwurst with sweet sherry and cream, for instance. Yuk! Crushed ginger snaps and pineapple in beef stock. Ugh! Marmalade, garlic and soy sauce. Yech! To my mind it is difficult to do better than the original Swiss cheese fondue, invented long ago to use up cheese which had dried out and hardened up over the winter. The name fondue came

from the French word fondre, meaning to melt. An authentic recipe, as given to me by my Swiss hostess Cordula Banzigger, is very simple: toss 300 g grated Gruyere and 300 g grated Emmental in 3 tbs flour; rub the pot with a cut clove of garlic, add and heat 2 cups dry white wine and then add the cheese in three instalments, stirring vigorously between additions in order to melt it and make it smooth. Do not allow the mixture to boil. Fin-

ally, add 3 tbs kirsch, a pinch of nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste. Use cubed French bread to dunk into it. Here is a non-tradi-tional cheese fondue, using more accessible ingredients: Cheddar and cider fondue Toss 500 g grated tasty Cheddar with 2 tbs flour until the slivers of cheese are well coated. Heat iy 4 cup dry cider with 1 clove crushed garlic and % tsp dry mustard. Add the cheese in three instalments, stirring vigorously between additions. Do not allow the mixture to boil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with cubes of French bread to dunk into it. Both this and the preceding fondue are most easily made on the kitchen stove, and then I taken to the table to be kept hot on the burner.